Tag: desktop environment

I seem to be having a problem with browsers using a lot of cpu and thus freezing the computer temporarily.

On debian 7 this started to happen with iceweasel, so i switched to chromium. Then after a period of blissful speed surfing, then chromium went slow too. Other options would be to use midori or quzilla, but what’s interesting is that i had hoped upgrading to debian 8 would disappear the problem and it hasn’t.

From reading around the internets, people were suggesting it’s not necessarily the browser but the desktop environment, so i tried switching from the default (gnome?) to LXDE, choosing this particular environment since it’s alleged to be good for the asus eee (tips).

However, the problems continue as you can see from the screenshot. What’s good is that the LXDE setup makes it much easier to track the problem, with the graphical CPU usage monitor display bottom right. I’m also using top that’s what is in the screenshot (open a terminal, type top).

This is a fresh debian 8 install so the machine is totally uncluttered. It seems bizarre a browser is taking up so much CPU (143% if you look at the screenshot above when i tried to open 3 tabs at once on iceweasel). And this problem was generated with only a few tabs open, trying to open two more.